Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We (...) conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect. (shrink)

One’s constitution—whether one is generous or miserly, temperate or intemperate, kind or mean, etc.—is beyond one’s control in significant respects. Yet one’s constitution affects how one acts. And how one acts affects one’s moral standing. The counterintuitive inference—the so-called problem of constitutive moral luck—is that one’s moral standing is, to some significant extent, beyond one’s control. This article grants the premises but resists the inference. It argues that one’s constitution should have no net impact on one’s moral standing. While a (...) bad constitution lowers the chance that one will act morally, it offers significant gains to moral standing should that chance materialize. A good constitution increases one’s chance of performing good acts but for correspondingly more modest gains. This effect should smooth out, and possibly eliminate, the expected impact of constitution on moral standing. (shrink)

Any effort to specify identity conditions for corporations faces significant challenges. Corporations are amorphous. Nature draws no hard lines defining where they start or stop, whether in space or time. Corporations are also frustratingly dynamic. They often change the most basic aspects of their composition by exchanging parts, splitting and merging, changing ownership, and reworking fundamental internal operations. -/- Even so, we apply corporate identity conditions all the time. Both law and common intuition recognize that corporations do things—like pollute environments (...) or mislabel addictive medications—that call for judgment. Imposing judgment on corporations presupposes some implicit view of corporate identity that allows us to say, “This corporation that we now judge is the same one that misbehaved.” -/- This chapter draws on evidence from court decisions and experimental philosophy to unpack the fundamentally different visions of corporate identity implicitly encoded in law and in common intuition. The discrepancies suggest important lessons for lawmakers and corporate managers. (shrink)

This Chapter provides a short undergraduate introduction to ethical and philosophical complexities surrounding the law’s attempt (or lack thereof) to regulate artificial intelligence. -/- Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed a simple thought experiment known as the paperclip maximizer. What would happen if a machine (the “PCM”) were given the sole goal of manufacturing as many paperclips as possible? It might learn how to transact money, source metal, or even build factories. The machine might also eventually realize that humans pose a (...) threat. Humans could turn the machine off at any point, and then it wouldn’t be able to make as many paperclips as possible! Taken to the logical extreme, the result is quite grim—the PCM might even start using humans as raw material for paperclips. -/- The predicament only deepens once we realize that Bostrom’s thought experiment overlooks a key player. The PCM and algorithms like it do not arise spontaneously (at least, not yet). Most likely, some corporation—say, Office Corp.—designed, owns, and runs the PCM. The more paperclips the PCM manufactures, the more profits Office Corp. makes, even if that entails converting some humans (but preferably not customers!) into raw materials. Less dramatically, Office Corp. may also make more money when PCM engages in other socially sub-optimal behaviors that would otherwise violate the law, like money laundering, sourcing materials from endangered habitats, manipulating the market for steel, or colluding with competitors over prices. The consequences are predictable and dire. If Office Corp. isn’t held responsible, it will not stop with the PCM. Office Corp. would have every incentive to develop more maximizers—say for papers, pencils, and protractors. -/- This chapter issues a challenge for tech ethicists, social ontologists, and legal theorists: How can the law help mitigate algorithmic harms without overly compromising the potential that AI has to make us all healthier, wealthier, and wiser? The answer is far from straightforward. (shrink)

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04827-y.